1881- Los Angeles becomes the first U.S. city to be lit
entirely by electricity.

1923-24-BBC overseas radio service first broadcast the
Chimes of Big Ben around the world.

1940-41- Avant Garde artists John Sloan and Marcel Duchamp
break into the Washington Square Arch in and declare Greenwich Village the
Republic of New Bohemia. Like coool, daddy.

1941- A Warner Bros memo dated this day from producer Hal
Wallis office announced that the movie to be made from a play by Murray Bennett
called “Everybody Goes to Rick’s” has been renamed “Casablanca”. This was to
capitalize on an already popular film title “Algiers” with Charles Boyer “come
with me to ze Casbah” etc.. Humphrey Bogart got the lead after George Raft
first turned it down. Bogie told a friend about his new project: “It’s just
some more sh*t like Algiers.”

1943- Four hundred policemen are called out to control
frenzied crowds of bobbysoxers as Frank Sinatra played the Paramount Theater in
Times Square. OOHH FRANKIE !!

1946- The first Pismo Beach Clam Festival.

1947- Roy Rogers married Dale Evans.

1958-59- As Fidel Castro's guerrillas closed in on Havana,
dictator Fulgensio Batista slipped out of a New Year's Party and boarded a
plane for Miami, all arranged by the CIA. Fredo, ya broke my heart…

1962- Romanoffs closed. One of the premier hot spots on the
Sunset Strip, it was the preferred hangout of Humphrey Bogart, who liked to
play chess in the afternoon with Nick Romanoff when he was between films.

1985- Singer Ricky Nelson died when his band's converted old
DC-9 airplane crashed near DeKalb, Texas. Nelson it was said had been living on
a steady diet of cheeseburgers and Snicker's bars.

1995- The last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip by Bill
Waterston

1999-2000 - The Y2K MANIA. While the world prepared to
celebrate the new century and the Third Millenium the American media whipped up
paranoia over a theory that the change from 1999-2000 would cause most
computers to crash. Planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear missiles would
launch themselves and marauders would rule the streets like something out of
Mad Max. The US Government spent $65 million to prepare for the crisis.

But at midnight absolutely nothing of the
kind happened. Even older, less sophisticated computers in Russia and China were
unaffected, and everything ran normal. Meanwhile, many of the US public stayed
home and watched the rest of the world have fun on television.

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**THANKS FOR READING MY LITTLE HISTORIES. I HOPE YOU HAVE AS
MUCH FUN READING THEM AS I DO WRITING THEM.

1941- “I Vant to be
Alone..” Film Star Greta Garbo announced she was retiring from motion
pictures and all public appearances. She made her disappearing act complete and
was only seen fleeting on the streets of New York until her death in the 1990s.

1963- T.V. game show "Let's Make a Deal" with
Monty Hall premieres.

1988- the Pixar short Tin
Toy released. The first CG short to win an Oscar. Until this win, Steve
Jobs was resisting his animation team making films. He was focused on getting
color graphics onto home computers. The first draft of Toy Story was built around the characters of Tin Toy.

1913- Cecil B.DeMille telegraphed his partners back in New
York:” Flagstaff no good for our purpose.
Have proceeded to California. Want authority to rent a barn in a place called
Hollywood for $75 a month.” His partner Sam Goldwyn cabled back: “ Rent barn on month to month basis. Do not
make long commitment.” DeMille began shooting the Squaw Man, the first
Hollywood Film.

1916-James Joyce’s novel “the Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man” published.

1939- Scientist William Shockley first noted in his laboratory
notebook that it should be possible to replace vacuum tubes with something
called a semi-conductor. Eight years later he led the team that developed the
transistor.

1964 – To create the first pilot of the TV series Star Trek,
the original filming model of the U.S.S. Enterprise was delivered by model
maker Rick Datin, Jr, based on the design created by Star Trek production
artist Walter “Matt” Jefferies.The
“miniature” was 11 feet long!

1965- First day shooting on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: a
Space Odyssey. It was an indoor set at Elstree Studios in England, and the
first setup was the inspection of the excavation of the Monolith in the moon
crater Tycho.

1968- Animator Bill Tytla died at age 64, from complications
of a stroke.

1972- LIFE Magazine ended publication.

1974- John Lennon signed the last papers dissolving the
Beatles while staying at the Polynesian Village in Disneyworld Fla. The band
broke up in 1970, but it’s taken this long to unravel all of their vast financial
holdings. The other three members had already signed.

1895- THE BIRTHDAY OF CINEMA- In Paris at the Grande Cafe
des Capucines the Lumiere brothers combined Edison's kinetoscope using George
Eastman’s roll film with a magic lantern projector and showed a motion picture
to an audience in a theater. Back in the U.S. Thomas Edison thought the idea of
projecting film in a theater was foolish and would never catch on. They called
their device a Cinematograph, hence the word Cinema is born. The screening
included dancers and people leaving a factory but the biggest reaction out of
the audience was from shots of waves crashing on a rocky beach. The audience in
the front row jumped for fear of getting wet.

1897- Edmond Rostands famous play CYRANO DE BERGERAC
premiered in Paris. There really lived a poet-duelist in the 1640’s named
Cyrano de Bergerac-Servigan but little was known about him. Rostand created the
hopelessly lovesick big nosed hero who helps another man romance his Roxanne.

1944- ON THE TOWN, a musical written by Betty Comden &
Adolf Green and young composer Leonard Bernstein premiered in NY.

1968- The Beatles White Album goes to number one on the pop
charts.

1983- Dennis Wilson was the original drummer of the Beach
Boys, but he had a pretty bad drug habit. He was once friendly with the Manson
Family.

Taking time off from rehab for Christmas he and some friends
sat on a yacht doing more drugs and booze near Marquesas Pier.Wilson recalled this very spot was where
after breaking up with his first wife he threw her mementos overboard. He
wondered if he could get them back and started “pearl-diving “i.e.-diving
holding your breath without any scuba equipment. But being stoned after several
dives, he miscalculated the depth he had gone to and drowned.

Dennis Wilson was 37. Of all the Beach Boys he was the only
one who actually liked to surf.

1887- Beginning of the Sherlock
Holmes story the Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

1903- The Barbershop Quartet
favorite “Sweet Adeline” sung for the first time. It was written in praise of
opera star Adelina Patti.

1904- PETER PAN, OR, THE BOY WHO
WOULDN’T GROW UP, a play by James M. Barrie, opened at the Duke of York Theatre
in London. Barrie reserved seats in the opening night performance for orphaned
children who laughed and cheered all night. Michael Llewelyn Davies, the little
boy Barrie befriended who was the basis for Pan, used to say:” I am not Peter
Pan. Mr Barrie is.” He committed suicide in 1960 at age 75. James Barrie once
said to H.G. Wells:” It’s all right and good to write books, but can you wiggle
your ears?”

1927- Broadway musical
"ShowBoat" debuts at the Ziegfeld theater. Based on a story by Edna
Ferber, the music was written by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein. The play
made a star out of a tall black baritone named Paul Robeson.” Ol’ Man River..”

1935- Radio City Music Hall
opened. The Art Deco masterpiece was for many years the largest indoor theater
in the world, seating over 6,000.

1940- Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler announced
their separation.

1943- The movie The Song of
Bernadette premiered.

1947- The "Howdy-Doody Show”
debuted on NBC. Buffalo Bob, Howdy and Clarabell the Clown, also known as the
Puppet Playhouse.

1924- Baby Frances Gumm first appeared on a stage at 2 1/2 years old. Grown up she would change her name to Judy Garland.

1926- Young artist Al Hirschfeld had made his first caricature for the Broadway Stage. A drawing of actor Sasha Guitry. A friend took it to The New York Tribune and sold it. He figured here's a nifty way to make a living, so soon he was selling to all the papers including the New York Times.

He will keep doing caricatures of Broadway greats into the millennium and became a legend himself. In the American Theater, a Hirschfeld caricature of you meant you had arrived and were a real star. At age 94 he remarried and drew the cast of Ally McBeal for TV Guide. In 2003 he died just shy of age 100, drawing to the end.

1938- Young playwright Thomas Williams moved from Saint Louis to New Orleans and changed his name to Tennessee Williams.

1939- Walt Disney Animation moves from Hyperion to the new Burbank Studio lot. The buildings are designed like hospital wards, so in case he hits economic trouble, Disney could sell them to the planned St. Joseph's Hospital across the street. Animator Ward Kimball said it was the first time he worked in a studio where all the furniture matched. The old Hyperion Studio was bulldozed in 1966, the year of Walt Disney’s death.

1941- Goofy cartoon, the Art of Self Defense, premiered.

1944- Tennessee Williams play the Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago.

1973- The horror film The Exorcist starring Linda Blair premiered. Merry Christmas! Have some pea soup!

1929- The Fox Atlanta Theater opened on Peachtree St. An
Arabian Nights-type fantasy in part financed by the Shriners so they could use
it for their meetings.

1931-The first BBC World Service Network broadcast. An
address by King George V called "Around the Empire".

1937-NBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the legendary
Arturo Toscanini premieres with its first radio broadcast.

1946- Comedian W.C. Fields died of alcoholism at 67.While in his hospital bed someone saw him
reading a Bible. They said:" W.C., what are you doing with that? "
Fields replied:" Looking for loopholes!"

1955- Chuck Jone's 'One
Froggy Evening' premiered. Director Steven Spielberg called it the
"Citizen Kane of Cartoons." If you wonder why you never heard the old
time ditty 'The Michigan Rag' anywhere else but here, was because Chuck Jones
& Mike Maltese wrote it specifically for the cartoon.

1957- Disney film Old
Yeller premiered.

1962- The film of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird premiered with Gregory Peck and Robert Duval.

1818-the
song Silent Night first sung at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Obersdorf,
Austria. It’s lyrics were written by the minister named Josef Mohr and music by
a teacher named Franz Gruber. Their church could not afford an organ, so this
first singing of Silent Night was accompanied on a guitar.

1922-
The BBC presented it’s first radio play:" The truth about Father
Christmas."

1925-
The London Evening News published a story “ In which we are introduced to
Winnie the Pooh, and some Bees.” By A.A. Milne. The first book comes out the
following year.

1952-
First draft script completed on the MGM film Terror Planet, changed to “
Forbidden Planet.”

1964-
First day shooting on the “Cage” a pilot for a new TV show called Star Trek.
Jeffrey Hunter was the first captain, later replaced by William Shatner when
Hunter’s wife advised him to skip the series. She was worried he’d be typecast.

1966-
Local New York City TV station WPIX premiered The Yule Log. They ran a loop of
6 minutes of a closeup of a log burning in a fireplace in Gracie Mansion. The
loop ran from 11:00PM to 1:00AM with Christmas carols playing. It made the TV
the symbolic family hearth. New Yorkers loved their kitschy Yule Log tradition,
and when WPIX tried to replace it in 1989 hundreds of complaints forced them to
put it back. The log was taped once more in 1970, and that’s been the film ever
since.

1990- Tom
Cruise married Nicole Kidman.

1997- 62 year old Film director Woody Allen married 27 year
old Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former lover Mia Farrow. When
asked to explain himself the director said: " The Heart wants what it Wants.."

1912- The Max Sennett short comedy “Hoffmeyer’s Release”
premiered, the first comedy featuring the Keystone Cops.

1913- Young Italian Rudolph Valentino arrived in America to
seek his fortune. He was so poor that after a year he sent his parents a photo
of himself in a borrowed tuxedo to allay their fears. He worked as a nightclub
dancer and gigolo until becoming a Hollywood film star in 1921.

1930- Young actress Betty Davis signed her first contract
with Universal Studio.

1935- Walt Disney sent a detailed memo to art teacher Don
Graham outlining his plans for retraining his animators to do realistic feature
films.

1935-1959, This was the traditional day for Republic Pictures
to fire all their employees and hire them back after New Years so they wouldn't
have to pay them holiday pay. Republic billed itself on it’s business cards as
The Friendly Studio.

1947- Two Bell laboratory scientists invent the Transistor.
Nobody was quite sure what to do with the little thing until Texas Instruments
invented the portable radio in 1954.

1940- Nathaniel West, novelist author of Day of the Locust
and Miss Lonelyhearts, was killed in a car crash in L.A.

1951- Yves Montand married Simone Signoret.

1964- In Chicago, Comedian Lenny Bruce was sentenced to four
months in prison on obscenity charges. When the arresting officer read aloud
his jokes, the jury laughed out loud. Lenny complained about the policeman’s
delivery. After Lenny Bruce no one has ever again been convicted in the U.S.
for telling jokes.

1933- Twentieth Century Fox signed 5 year old Shirley Temple
to a seven year contract.

1937-Walt Disney's " Snow White and the Seven
Dwarves" had its grand premiere at the Cathay Circle Theater. The first
feature length American cartoon, it became the box office champ of 1938, earning
4 times more than any other film that year.

1940- Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (44) died of a heart attack
at Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham's house.She had just left the house to buy him some candy.